Tag Archives: Case Study

October 13, 2014 · 3:31 PM

X1’s Enterprise Search Webinar Takeaways

by Barry Murphy

Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar on enterprise search and how to do it in a way that actually works.  Early feedback indicates that the webinar was well-received, mostly thanks to the involvement of Marcus Stimler, Capgemini’s UK CTO.  Marcus generously gave us his time to share lessons learned about how to make business productivity search work by putting the end-users first.  It was an important point – getting the win by making users happy and then extending the project from there.  The real world perspective that someone like Marcus can provide is invaluable and I learned a lot from listening to him.

There are a few key takeaways that are worthy of sharing and repeating:

  1. Search is a journey. Thinking of search as a “project” can be a mistake; rather, search is a journey that keeps going and, if done right, keeps providing value.  For Capgemini, it really began with a realization that people couldn’t find what they were looking for– despite having search tools in place.  Individual workers actually found X1 Search 8 and became loyal advocates.  Marcus, as CTO, learned about these passionate users and was able to roll out the X1 product more broadly so that Capgemini’s high-value knowledge workers could be more productive.  Once end-users were able to find what they were looking – most of which was in their email or desktop files – Capgemini was able to extend the journey by adding content sources like SharePoint to the search solution.
  2. The “Google paradigm” simply does not work in the enterprise. This might have been one of the most important points that Marcus made because, thanks to Google, there is a perception that search is easy.  Marcus learned that search within an enterprise is very different than web search, which relies on popularity for prioritizing search results.  Relying on popularity inside the enterprise will lead to problems because only a few employees will actually tag and/or rate documents.  Individual workers treat organizational knowledge differently and need a search tool that allows them to work their way.  As Marcus said, “relevancy is more important than popularity.”  And, it’s the business workers that know what is relevant and what isn’t.
  3. The human workflow is a huge consideration. As Marcus points out, and the major theme of the webinar, it is important to start with the end-users and win them over first.  For Capgemini, that meant using a tool that allowed people to quickly find what they are looking for and then take action on it.  That is exactly what X1 does.  For Capgemini, X1 gives their employees the ability to do their job better and faster – and that leads to all sorts of positive outcomes.  Because Capgemini values the knowledge of their workers, the company is able to leverage that knowledge for increased revenues and that leads to Marcus getting a positive ROI on the X1 investment – an important consideration for any IT person.

A huge thank you goes out to Marcus Stimler for sharing his time and knowledge with us.  If you have not had a chance to see the webinar, you can check out the recording here: http://www.x1.com/products/x1_rapid_discovery/videos/search_that_works_request.html

Feel free to be in touch with any questions.

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October 7, 2014 · 6:52 AM

Top Five Reasons to Attend X1’s Enterprise Search Webinar

This Wednesday, October 8 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, X1 will host a very interesting webinar focused on “Enterprise Search That Actually Works.”  In this session, Webinar imagewe will look at how organizations can finally get to a point where employees are actually able to find what they are looking for in the mountains of digital information that exists.  At the heart of this webinar is the idea that end-users are the key to successful search projects.

It is, after all, end-users that are searching for information all day, every day.  Successful search initiatives must capture and please those end-users.  But, IT projects tend to be pushed out from a central IT organization rather than “pulled” in by the end users.  The result, in terms of enterprise search, was failed projects where a lot of money was spent, but users were still not able to find what they were looking for.

The good news is that there is a better way to approach enterprise search by focusing on the end-user and making “business productivity search” a priority.  In this upcoming webinar, we will show you exactly how to deploy enterprise search in a way that works – making both IT and end-users happy.  There are five main reasons you will not want to miss this webinar:

  1. A realistic case study from Capgemini. Marcus Stimler, Capgemini’s UK CTO, will join us and describe the challenges he addressed with X1 and how focusing on the needs of users drives the broader enterprise search strategy.  Marcus will bring a pragmatic viewpoint from the trenches and is able to answer questions from those of you in a similar position wondering how to make enterprise search work.
  2. A demo-based approach to getting the point across. Sure, we will go through a couple of PowerPoint slides, but most of the webinar will feature an example of how to actually get buy-in from the end-users and provide them with a search tool that delivers productivity.  And, we will show you how to extend outward from the end-user to address more and more enterprise repositories as needed.
  3. A chance to learn from and avoid the mistakes of the past.  Those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat it – that’s why we will look at how traditional approaches to enterprise search did not work.  More importantly, we will show you how to change those approaches to capture the end-users and make search work in a way that works for your organization’s IT environment.
  4. A new way to look at enterprise search. Too often, search is just another IT project and organizations miss the fact that search functionality can and should evolve.  This webinar will focus on search as a journey that goes beyond the initial “project.”  In fact, the Capgemini case study will be a perfect example of a search initiative that evolves – and does so from the core premise that end-users must be happy and able to easily find what they are looking for.
  5. A special thank you gift that will outline how to succeed with enterprise search. All attendees will be given an as-yet-unpublished paper on how to make enterprise search work.  This paper will outline the mistakes to avoid and provide the strategic elements for effective business productivity search.

We hope you can join us for this webinar.  It should be a fun hour and we like to keep it interactive by taking your questions throughout the webinar.  Please register now if you haven’t already.

 

 

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June 19, 2012 · 7:00 AM

Case Study: The Importance of Integrated Social Media and Website Crawling Collection

One of the benefits of the very strong market adoption of our X1 Social Discovery software is that we receive a significant amount of invaluable and excellent customer feedback from very seasoned eDiscovery and law enforcement professionals. Many of these experts report that a good number of their social media investigation and collection cases also require general website collection. For instance, a person on Facebook promoting infringing technology may also be posting relevant information to industry web bulletin boards or maintaining their own website. It is thus important that a social media eDiscovery and investigation process feature integrated web collection and social media support.

For an effective process, website data should be collected, searched and reviewed alongside social media collections in the same interface. The collected website data should not be a mere image capture or pdf, but a full HTML (native file) collection, to ensure preservation of all metadata and other source information as well as to enable instant and full search and effective evidentiary authentication. All of the evidence should be searched with one pass, reviewed, tagged and, if needed, exported to an attorney review platform from a single workflow.

To illustrate what this looks like in the field, we recorded an 8 minute demonstration based in part upon a real life example reported to us by one of our customers. This case study, performed by our CTO Brent Botta, involves the collection of social media data as well as message board posts on the web. Importantly, this evidence is consolidated into a unified workflow to be searched in one single pass.

The investigation features X1 Social Discovery as the platform, which now features automated and integrated web crawling capabilities in addition to its renowned functionality for the collection and analysis of Facebook and Twitter content. We believe this is the only solution of its kind to collect website evidence both through a one-off capture or full crawling, including on a scheduled basis, and have that information instantly reviewable in native file format through a federated search that includes multiple pieces of social media and website evidence in a single case. Up to millions of web captures and social media items are searched instantly with the patented X1 search, tagged and exported from a single interface.

Like social media content, web pages bring their own unique but important challenges for evidentiary authentication. In the next week, we will be posting on best practices for the collection and authentication of web pages as evidence, so stay tuned!

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February 8, 2012 · 8:50 AM

A Real World Social Media Discovery Case Study From the Trenches

As mentioned in my last post, many law firms and eDiscovery service providers have in recent months extensively discussed social media discovery in a general fashion. Such dialogue is important and educational, but it is  great to see the innovative service firm D4 highlighting their major league, battle tested social media discovery capabilities by outlining a case study where they delivered a huge win for their clients.

D4, experts in computer forensics and eDiscovery consulting, recently tackled a case involving the capture of several dozen Facebook and LinkedIn accounts amounting to over 2 million items. Utilizing X1 Social Discovery, D4 rapidly collected and searched through these items to quickly pare down the item count to roughly 7,000. Once the social media data set was at 7,000 items, D4 exported the data into the review platform Relativity.

In addition to D4’s prowess, three critical factors served as game changers to allow for this exercise that would otherwise have been impossible without best practices technology. First, D4 was able to collect these 2 million items on a highly automated basis with X1 Social Discovery. If screen captures were used instead, it may literally take a year to capture that volume of data. Second, once captured those two million items were indexed at the point of collection and placed within a designated case to allowing for searching, sorting and analysis in a single interface and case-centric workflow. D4’s efforts reveal how X1’s workflow and patented fast-as-you type search enables very effective early case assessment for social media.

Finally, X1 Social Discovery’s unique ability to capture several dozens of metadata fields for social media was extremely important to the case. D4 states:

“We were able to take advantage of the metadata fields captured by D4 during the collection process…The attorneys were able to go through the posts in less than two days and found a dozen or more posts that were critical to the case. In my opinion, without using the tools and expertise offered by D4 they never would have found the evidence.”

We agree.

Law Technology NewsAnd on a related recent development, John Waters of Law Technology News published a review of X1 Social Discovery after his extensive testing, and the results are consistent with the scalable functionality leveraged by D4:

“In my tests, X1 (Social Discovery) was fast and responsive…The interface is clean and simple, with a logical layout. And the feature set is just about everything you could ask for as you dig into the burgeoning mounds of status updates, tweets, digital pictures, hash tags, comments, and links. I was impressed with X1’s ability to search globally across the public feeds of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn with the X1 Search engine’s fast-as-you-type feature. The product’s ability to scale makes it flexible enough to allow e-discovery pros to cope with a massive and rapidly expanding source of potential evidence.”

The broader point in both of these examples is that X1 Social Discovery is enabling technology that allows law firms, consultants, and other practitioners to transition from just talking about social media discovery to winning big league cases with cutting edge technology.

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